WVFA Winter 2018-19

I N D U S T R Y N E W S www.wvfa.org Winter 2018–2019 |  West Virginia Forestry Association Mountain State Forestry 11 An example of this practice is about the paperwork used for organizing and inspecting forest inventories. Pages and pages are written and saved to be checked during inventory counting, a process that can be modernized simply by the use of digital data, such as spreadsheets and software monitoring for these same inventories. Besides, the fact that the workers do not risk getting confused in the middle of the paperwork if they are digitally organized and much easier to access. 2. Efficiency Duplicate reports? Measurements with discrepant data? Certainly, the common mistakes in the timber industry are not the fault of its employees, but they can be due to a number of factors, including the lack of planning and organization of the industry as a whole or old practices that make the work inefficient. Once again, human labor in conjunction with new technologies in the forestry industry is an important step towards the implementation of a much more logical work pace, which also targets the life quality of the forest workers, as well as reducing common problems during the processes. An example? Overloaded wooden trucks are dangerous for the driver, inconceivable for the roads, and become a problem for the producers and buyers. Having a tool that helps the driver to organize the loads and to trace the best routes avoids problems of safety, overweight, and lack of control in incoming and outcoming of these loads. 3. Profitability Less is more: this is the market trend in the 21st century. Linking the two previous topics—Environmental Awareness and Efficiency—industry then becomes more apt to reduce resources and stick to a model that projects profits through the productivity and economy of resources that become obsolete. Much less material is discarded based on these aspects, increasing production and hence the sale, given the growing and consistent demand. With the use of technologies suitable for production, quality and quantity rise to a new level and the demand for materials from the forest industry becomes more stable and profitable. The digital control of the production indicates less losses, for example, in the count of logs or in the quality and size of them, reducing bottlenecks in the production. A practical example is the paper industry, whose equipment needs a certain variety in diameters. When there is no control, these logs become unwanted and end up going to waste— generating unnecessary losses. With digital control, the producer correctly organizes where each of these logs will go, increasing production and, consequently, profit. Now that we have mentioned some of the reasons why the timber industry should be modernized, we present Timbeter, a digital solution that targets efficiency and profitability for environmental awareness, since all data will be digitally organized, from cutting to production.